When we create art we are “encoding” our ideas, we think this color will represent this, this looks nice here, and this space should be filled with that. Our art will take on a meaning as we do this, however once it becomes legitimized, that is to say looked at by other people, they interpret it differently; this is “decoding.” We create something that is perceived as something else. Hall goes on to discuss this in relation to television.
His article reminded me of The Treachery of Images by Rene Magritte. He painted a Pipe, and wrote in French underneath this image of a pipe, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” The translation to that means, “This is not a pipe.” At first this tends to confuse the onlooker, clearly it looks like a pipe. The image is shaped like a pipe, it reminds them of a pipe, so you look at that image and say, “That is a nice pipe,” or even, “I don’t like that pipe, it doesn’t make sense.” But it’s not a pipe; it’s an image of a pipe. It’s a pipe that you cannot touch, without dimensions, no smell, and no interaction. It’s a reminder to the art world that what we are looking at is imitation but not the real thing. It’s the sacrifice of art, an imitation.
Hall discusses this in terms of cows and violence, it reminds me of my Culture and Society in the West II class, Professor Anne Kern discussed to us that when we see a table, we know it’s a table, but all tables look different. It’s fascinating just by the knowledge of something having certain qualities we can recognize it as the same thing yet they are entirely different. It’s the idea of mass culture really, we all create something with a similar use and because it’s used in a similar way we all consider it to be the same, and yet when something looks or steers away from those boundaries of normality we no longer understand what to think of it. Oftentimes we become afraid of it and dismiss it as having the ability to be a table because it only has three legs, that’s when it becomes “modern,” because it’s no longer “traditional.”
Art roots itself into tradition, we see the same….similar things over and over and then we recognize it as this or that. And then once it’s established as this or that, someone changes it and everyone imitates it once again.
How does all of this relate itself to television? It’s simple. Television once again, is an imitation. Look at the sitcom, we all know its formula, the soap opera, the same thing. We create a recognizable situation, however that situation isn’t there, that cow isn’t there, that violence isn’t there. It’s an imitation of that cow, that situation, that violence. It’s a message about that situation, that cow, and that violence; a commentary. This is also in due part because of the input of the director. He thinks a cow looks like this, or violence looks like that so this is how he frames it, then we as the audience, output it by agreeing, this cow looks like that and this is what violence is like and we make our conclusions based off of this very idea. Violence and cows aren’t something we see everyday so in a way this encoding/decoding commentary on an imitation can actually shape our ideology of how we see things. It’s even sometimes a scary thought.
